by Liz Grzyb
Hitler sprawled out in the street, dead by an Australian bullet.
“So this is the short life of Adolf Hitler, one of your most celebrated citizens. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that he was not Jewish.”
“No. You are lying,” Eloise began, and then she found herself on her feet, shouting. “Filthy liar! You should be ashamed!”
A moment later a knock on the door, and a Mossad agent poked his head in. By his side, a Federal Police Officer loomed, hand on his holster. Still furious, Eloise gathered herself and sent the pair away.
“What is it that you want?” Eloise finally managed. “Are you after money?”
“I have met with almost every surviving Hitler,” Lynch said. “Whenever I tell them my discovery, they offer money, they threaten me, and they deny everything I’ve found. So no, I’m not after money, and no, I’m not scared of you.”
Lynch leaned forward, manipulating the e-papyrus, and brought up another image. This of a young Hitler, in his Viennese days. He was in the midst of a group of men who gathered around a café table, where a portly man in a fine suit smiled and allowed his photograph to be taken.
“Georg Ritter von Schönerer, politician and virulent anti-Semite. He ransacked a Jewish newspaper, and advocated for the mass imprisonment and deportation of Jews. So why did Adolf Hitler, adored Jewish son, admire him so?”
More photos from Vienna. Protests against the Jews and the Roman Catholics, and in each one was the young Hitler, waving placards and shouting. Von Schönerer’s funeral, where a face that might have been Hitler’s could just be made out in the pews.
“This is where young Adolf turns from politics and rededicates his life to his art. But he is rejected twice from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His money was running out, and he was living in the homeless shelters.
“So, almost overnight, he invents a Jewish ancestry out of whole cloth. We hear of a Jewish man named Leopold Frankenberger, who seduced Fraulein Schicklgruber, spawning Alois Hitler, who gave us Adolf. With a specious piece of paper in hand, he follows a stream of Jewish artists away from the violence of Europe, and out to the refugee sanctuary in Australia. Already a famed art school is drawing people to Tel Golah, to your ‘Hill of Exile’. There Hitler finds his fame, enters politics, encourages a secession from Australia, and is assassinated for his troubles.”
He opened another document on the device, this one the scan of an old type-written manuscript. Eloise blanched when she read the title, and then the opening text. Grand delusions, seductive madness, crude in places but it was undeniably the early words of the great Jewish orator, dead before he could realise his potential.
“MEIN KAMPF GEGEN DIE JUDEN by Adolf Hitler,” Lynch read.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered.
“A source who is just as dedicated as me to revealing the truth of this man. Your ancestor was not only a false Jew, he was a raving anti-Semite, and he very nearly started a Great War of many nations. Imagine that, the whole world at war, and all because one liar wanted to become a famous artist!
“Eloise, I think you already know all of this. Your entire family is trying to sit on this secret. There have been whispers at family gatherings, things your parents hinted at. You know all this is true.”
“If you publish this, you will be laughed at,” Eloise said. “A grand conspiracy theory, but anyone could have doctored those photos, that— that document.”
“This is the story of the century. I don’t care about your stupid mutant animals. Verify my story, and I’ll list you as an unnamed source in the Hitler family.”
Eloise sat there silently, fists clenched in her lap.
“It is your choice. What do you care about more, your work or your family name? You yourself said it was a burden.”
“I’m—I’m going to need a drink.”
Eloise fussed about on the side bar of her compartment, sloshing whisky into a pair of tumblers. She returned, setting a glass in front of the reporter, and settled down with a sigh.
“We are fixing the mutation problem,” she finally admitted. “Three more generations and we will have a dominant purity in the Diprotodon bloodline. You have to believe me, Mr Lynch, we are doing a good thing for the world here. Environmentally sustainable protein, enough to feed the world.”
“So, you are choosing your life’s work. Admirable,” Lynch said, lifting his drink. “Let us drink to both our lives’ works.”
“Indeed,” Eloise said, and clinked his glass.
“It is true that we are rushing our program,” she continued. “We will not have this chance again. Next year Prussia helms the League of Nations, and they will not push the Ottomans as much as Australia means to. We want to end the Diaspora, Mr Lynch. We will gamble everything we have on going home, to our real home.”
Lynch sipped at his drink, and Eloise noted that his eyes were aflame with triumph. He’d won one over her. He seemed content to let her speak now that he thought he had his source.
“It will hurt our cause to have Adolf Hitler exposed, but not as much as it will to lose our main export. Your exposé would make for an interesting footnote in history, no more. Of course, I will not allow you to tell either story.”
“What?” Chris Lynch managed. He took one shuddering breath, then another. His face turned pale with shock, and he raised one fluttering hand towards his throat. He lost the strength halfway, and his hand dropped to the tabletop.
“I have a second job, Mr Lynch,” Eloise Hitler said. “I am an operative for Mossad. I feel safe in telling you this, because you are, in fact, dying.”
She moved her chair around the table, and cradled the journalist’s face with her hands. His eyes jerked around wildly, and his breaths came in short, panicked gulps. He tried to cry out for help, only to find that his tongue wasn’t working correctly.
“Nanotoxins,” Eloise said softly, nudging his glass with her index finger. “You looked at my department so closely, I’m honestly amazed that you missed this research.”
Lynch began to whimper, a high note that barely escaped his lips. His feet began to dance weakly, a soft shuffle on the carpet, powerless to get him away from this cabin, from his murder.
“You won’t suffer long. My people will escort you back to your cabin, and you will look drunk. By the time the maglev arrives in Alice Springs, you will be dead in your own cabin, comfortably settled in your armchair. We know you are reading Picnic at Hanging Rock, and it will be resting in your hands as if you’d just dozed off. If there is an autopsy, it will show that your heart gave out.”
She copied the contents of his e-papyrus to her own computer, and dumped all the data from his comm the same way.
“You no doubt have someone else in on this, with the instructions to release this data should something happen to you,” Eloise said. “Within the hour, I will have a team working to discredit your work and to destroy you personally. Most likely we have enough to stop further leaks. Rest assured your sources and your collaborators will be snuffed out, one by one.”
A tear ran down Lynch’s face, and she blotted it away with her thumb.
“Don’t be sad, Mr Lynch,” Eloise said. “You came close, but the wheels of nations crush men like you. Your life was always going to end this way.”
Two plainclothes agents came to collect the man, and they caroused up the hallways, singing a drinking song and carrying their ‘drinking buddy’ back to his compartment. Eloise Hitler savoured her whisky to the last drop, and poured Lynch’s down the sink.
* * *
They came into Alice Springs. As the maglev swung towards the station, Eloise saw the shimmer of water, as far as the horizon and then further. The Inland Sea. It fed in past Port Augusta and the soggy ruins of Adelaide, and filled the entire red centre of the country.
She’d seen the footage of the Australians as they carved a great canal north, seeking to bisect the continent. Soon this would open a shipping route to the Dutch East Indies, Hon
g Kong and French Indo-China. Australia meant to feed the world, and now it had the means to. Rice and corn, algae loaf and kangaroo, and now their Jewish prodigal sons were gifting them endless supplies of Diprotodon meat, a cheap protein for all.
Eloise filed out of the train behind the Prime Ministers and other dignitaries, smiling at the press. A brass band was in full swing, mangling some Jewish classics before saving face with a rousing performance of God Save the King.
More speeches, and then the delegation was taken to the harbour. Giant cruise ships were at dock, some for the tourists and some for the new citizens who’d decided to stay. There were new arcologies and high-rise apartments all around Alice Springs, spreading from the historical township and all along the coastline of this new sea.
The Australians had taken this environmental disaster and turned it into a strange mixture of the French Riviera and the drowned Gold Coast. Eloise had read that there were more cranes in this area than anywhere else in the world, and her mind boggled at the scale of the construction.
This was nothing to Eyre, the marvelous floating city in the centre of the Inland Sea. It dwarfed the memories of drowned Sydney—their “Shine City” was a Camelot where the Australians had never known one.
She found herself herded up a gangplank, boarding an enormous trimaran. Sailors in full navy whites crewed the ship, and on board there was more bunting, more flags and bands and crowing diplomacy when one hundred years earlier they’d been at war. Thus to Eyre the Jewish nation came, cap in hand, finally giving back what they’d bled to seize.
Eloise was hemmed in with celebrities and politicians, all gab and glamour, maneuvering for favours and deals. Feeling faint, Eloise excused herself, and stood out on the fore-deck of the ship.
She thought about Chris Lynch, remembered the quiet appearance of an ambulance at the maglev station. No doubt there would be an interview with the Australian Federal Police in her future, questioning her over the argument they’d heard in her compartment. Her Mossad subordinates had already mocked up most of an interview between Lynch and herself, a focus on her role in the Department of Agriculture. The argument would be blamed on a disagreement over her research, already smoothed over by the time he’d left her cabin and started drinking in earnest.
When she remembered the panic in Lynch’s eyes, the realisation that his killer was sitting right across from him, Eloise smiled. She felt a great satisfaction from the murder, and was pleased that she could pass it off as a clandestine service to her nation.
That moment though, when she’d held a life in her hands and snuffed it out—it was heady stuff. Addictive. She gripped the railing and imagined herself one day holding a great office, something even old Adolf would have been proud of. Perhaps Prime Minister of Israel, or a power behind the throne, someone free to crush enemies, to make bloody examples when they were needed.
Eloise felt that secret darkness bubbling away within her, the heritage of her bloodline. When the great floating city of Eyre came into view, she imagined it in flames, bombs splintering the soaring glass spires, thousands of panicked people bobbing in the water and drowning.
There and then, Eloise Hitler decided there was beauty in death, and she resolved to explore this fully.
* * ** * ** * *
Island Green
Shauna O’Meara
Kara storms into the lobby of the once five-star Palau Mabul resort, throwing the entrance weaves aside so forcibly the pandanus thwacks against the wall. Hurling her wiry two-hundred-and-nine-days-on-the-island frame into the wicker recliner, she addresses the camera hovering in the centre of the room: “The game needs to stop!” Dead, brown skin is peeling from her shoulders and nose like the paint of a condemned house, and her eyes, reflected in the huge dark lens of the camera, seem sunken in the shifting amber light of the solar wall sconces. Fresh blood stripes her knuckles.
Even by her own measure, she is a far cry from the ruddy girl who’d bounced into the Logue Room on Day One and boasted that her team had the Island Green Contest “in the fucking bag.”
What’s wrong, Kara? The voice of the interviewer is psychiatrist calm, almost lilting.
Kara’s lip twists. “You know damn well.” There are cameras all over the Malaysian island of Mabul; nothing any of the three teams—Sustain, Advance and Rebuild—does goes unrecorded. When the interviewer doesn’t reply, Kara huffs with impatience and adds, “Okay, well, as you know, the people from the surrounding islands have been helping us work our seaweed lines.”
We understand that they were raiding your waters and stealing produce to the detriment of Tenets One, Two and Ten.
“Yes. They were. Initially. Until we let them exchange labour for samphire and seaweed. It’s an arrangement that’s been going well. But now there’s a problem—”
Do you want to allocate a portion of your team budget to securing your waters? You can afford it.
“Huh? No! The opposite. Our presence has created the issue and these are their waters—”
There is a bang from the pandanus and a flash of starry sky beyond as Silas stalks in. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Kara? You split Curtis’ goddamn lip! That’s not going to look good on tele.”
“He was asking for it.”
“It was out of line. Interference with another team. We’ll be lucky if we’re not disqualified.”
“Forget the game, Silas! You don’t care what they’ve done?” Kara runs a hand through brine-clumped hair, feeling the rough scrape of embedded sand. “You’re team leader! You’re the one who should be in here doing this.”
“This?” Silas eyes the camera, suddenly wary. “What is ‘this’ exactly?”
Silas, the Logue Room is a private space for contestants to record their thoughts—
“I’m asking them to close down the game on environmental grounds.“
“You’re what? Are you fucking mental?”
Kara’s nostrils flare. She stands and drags Silas out into the night air, where they are met by another of the ubiquitous, hovering Island Green cameras.
The derelict resort with its Logue Room occupies the highest point in the landscape, and from its vantage, Mabul Island spreads out around them, small enough since the sea rose for Kara to see the ocean lapping at the edges.
For the contest, the island is divided like a pie.
A third is occupied by the Team Advance project, the blocky shapes of their vertical farms spread across the landscape like computer servers, the huge boxes of glass and the solar array that serves them glazed blue in the moonlight. Wave generators, doubling as breakwaters against storm surge, form a low black wall beyond the tideline, while further out, the floating meshes of Advance’s carrageenan farms lift and fall on the gentle sea, black pixels in the reflective water.
Kara and Silas’ third is the Team Sustain project, fields of edible samphire and salt-resistant crops resting low and shaggy across the landscape, interrupted only by the tents of their four scientists and the squat, domed shape of Tomaso’s waste-recycling, biogas digester. Beyond the mangrove beds of the shallows, established to filter runoff as well as protect against storm surge, the parallel float-lines of the edible agar-agar and seagrape crops intermingle with the yellow buoys marking out the giant clam cages on the sea floor.
But it is toward Team Rebuild’s third that Kara turns Silas’ body and his attention. Down the slope, inefficient wheat, barley and lupins of the old world bed down on boated-in soil and superphosphate set atop an advanced salt-impermeable membrane. Carbon-based power carries scoring penalties, so there is solar, thank God. Rebuild has also copied Team Advance’s breakwater/wave generator (when confronted about the theft of ideas, Curtis had merely replied that the contest was not so much one of salted-land rehabilitation as farming innovation and in no future imaginable would innovation ever be devoid of espionage.) Huge, black rings of protein-demanding salmon and groupers are spread out across Rebuild’s third of the water and beyond those, Kara can just make out
the security boats Curtis has hired to protect their live product from poaching.
The whole project is distasteful and even Silas, mostly diplomatic, has decried Rebuild as not particularly imaginative given the technological resources at the show’s disposal, but outdated tech is not the reason Kara has called for the game to end.
All along the shoreline, the water is glowing blue, a spangly, glacial, lethal blue, like a section of galaxy seeping through a crack in the earth or a warning mark on a blue-ringed octopus.
“Red tide,” Silas says, almost wearily, when Kara points it out. “I was there, remember, when you clocked Curtis in the mouth for it. Without proof of damages sustained on our end, I might add.” He rolls his eyes, mutters we’ll be lucky if we aren’t sued. “I have Naoko checking on the clams. We’ll know soon enough if we have to write them off. Don’t worry, Kara. We still have the seaweed and your land crops. I’ll think of something to balance the books.” His teeth flash grimly: challenge accepted. Silas is here because, like all of them, he is competitive to his core. “We can still win this thing. No need to spit the dummy and pack up our gear.”
Kara wonders if he sees the blue rim of the sea as she does, or if the ragged, glowing line advancing up and down the beach transforms somehow in his mind into the up-down fickleness of a stock chart. The sea swirls in from the left, edging the troughs and crests of the line upward: bull market.
“If we’d gotten to harvest, the Chinese would have paid loads for the meat,” Silas muses, already factoring that the clams are dead, already on damage control. The tide recedes from the left, gives way to the bear. “What do you think about using them for fertiliser, Kara? Reckon they’d boost the samphire? If we’re lucky, the bloom will fuck up Rebuild’s fish. They’ll have losses—”
